Stories from the India War
by R. Donald James Gauvreau
Summary: Voldemort wasn't the end of war, just as he wasn't the beginning. There was Grindelwald before him, and after him there came the war in India. Complete because each story is self-contained, but more may be added at any time.
1. Homecoming, Homegoing

**Homecoming, Homegoing**

For centuries, as Britain's assorted ministries extended their influence throughout the world, colony by colony, the Ministry of Magic followed in the shadows, exerting the powers allotted to it by treaty and managing the populations of wizards which came under its influence. And centuries later, as those few mugglish souls who knew of the Ministry's promises died and (most fortuitously) failed to pass on their knowledge, the wizarding world of Britain slipped away from the control of the Empire, breaking old treaties made with a power which now no longer remembered they'd been made. The Ministry of Magic made itself known to its superiors with every succession, of course, but as equals, a shadow government taking care of things better left unmentioned, living alongside but not subject to the laws of the Queen.

But one day, the Americans rebelled, and the wizards there set up the old Kingdom of Fourteen. It was a strange land, a hard land, with a warped kind of magic, and the Ministry of Magic never reclaimed those lands. It had a hard enough time retaining what was left. "No. Not again," they said. "Never again." Slowly Britain crumbled, letting its colonies slip away, but the Ministry of Magic stood its ground, from Canada and Australia to Pakistan and Somalia.

And India.

"Pax Britannica!" was the cry, when the accidental death of a government figure turned riots into small battles, and the death of a child in the crossfire lit a lying powder keg and exploded into war. "Empire still stands," they said, "and we cannot allow it to crumble. We need you."

So Alex went, and he fought, and now they tell him that the war's over and that he can return home.

He covered in tattoos, just like every other Veteran what came back from that little tafri people so affectionately refer to as the "India War." Those tattoos tell a story better about what happened than he could. Here the vine winding its way up his left arm, thirteen thorns, one for every man or woman what died under his command. These spots of red here mark where he was splattered by the blood of his friend, when the other man was blown apart by a blast of energy what somehow slipped through their shields.

On his cheek, the serial number branded onto his flesh by the Marathas when he was captured three years into the war, thrown into the hell camps so they could draw out the process of his death and tap the energy from it. There on his back he got a little black chicken-scratch mark for every day he spent there.

All seven-hundred-twenty of them.

Come home?

Like hell.

This int home. He came from here, sure, 'fore he spent eleven years minus the hell camps killing so he wouldn't be killed. But this int home. They think he don't know how they lookit him? Fear - Awe - Disgust - Worship. Mebbe most worship the ground what the Veterans walk on. He don't care for the whole lot of them chamchas. He don't know them, they most certainly don't know him.

Here what he know: He fought, bled, almost died for them, they sit on their asses all day, they don't know what they near lost.

Was another world, where all the old rules dint apply anymore, on account of age-old defenses holding up too well against age-old offenses. So it's new strategies, spells designed to heal or fix or just plain clean the house, set to a new purpose, to killing people as bad as possible, and old techniques dredged up, bad things, dark things, almost like magic nukes, things that played games with the natural laws, things shoulda never have existed. How many people died just because all that hagga was interacting in ways it never was meant to, and nobody could have figured that this minor spell and that one caused the body to break down in horrendous ways. Mutating spells, dammit. Hell wasn't all in the camps.

He dint enter hell only when he got thrown in the camps, and he dint leave it when they finally found the one he was in and got him and his men out.

Who knows what he done and what been done to him? Wasn't there when the Marathas went through the Imbued sections of Delhi, during those final fourteen days, and raped and butchered every soul there, just because they supported the Britishers. Anyone who was there, they dead, Mistah Kurtz, if they weren't slaughtering. But he saw the same madness on his own side in those last few days.

He walks down the street, sometimes they ask him, ask him if he was one of the Seven Masked Men. He tells everyone the same thing, that if he wasn't one of them, was only because he wasn't in on their plans.

You can be thrown in prison just for saying you have photos of what the Marathas did to those three Britishers, that day that started the countdown on the final fourteen. Alex saw. There's not a Veteran alive who hasn't. Just that it was only the Seven what actually snapped that day, and if they marched right into Dacoit Gull, and killed every last bastard's son who wasn't torn to pieces already and blew the whole place so down that there was barely dust...

Those were the heroes, the only ones who retrieved those dead boys, and what happened, they had to do, and they sent a message, that you don't do that to Britishers and put them up for display like pieces of meat.

Now, what do the chamchas know? How do they relate? They don't know the cant, they don't know the signs, the marks, the way of living, the thing that makes a Britisher Veteran something more than a British wizard.

So when a kid comes up to him and asks him if he'd go and fight again, Alex thinks right carefully. One day, it might be the kid what makes the first decision.

"A thing's worth doing, anuj, it's worth doing as often as needs doing. Pax Britannica."

The sun can never set on the Ministry of Magic. Dint matter if the words were true. But you got to have something more important than you, and out of everything in the world, there are worse things to kill, suffer, and die for.


	2. On Coming Home Again

**On Coming Home Again**

So he comes back from the war, and he tries to pick up the pieces.

He went to old Dia the moment the call went out. They said it was going to take six months to pacify the area. The whole war had started out of anger and accidents and innocents caught in crossfires, and everyone knew that most of the native population was on the side of Empire. It was just a bunch of diehards who wouldn't let the past lie.

Eleven damn years he spent in Dia. But that's his fault, not that of the people who sent him there. They thought it was six months. He thought it was six months. Then everyone realized that the Marathas weren't going to go that easily, and it turned into seven months, and eight months, and a year, and two, and now he's come home. He could have left. But he had a responsibility.

She doesn't see it that way, all the time. She understands, mostly, but there are times, times when she realizes just how much they've missed, that she curses him and the Ministry and all of Empire. He could have come home, couldn't he? There were other people fighting. They could have done without him.

That's fine. The past can't be changed, and he just lets her vent it all out, and he makes sure to be there for when she needs something to hold onto, and he tries to make up for eleven lost years.

But it's so hard to do it.

His son was two when he left. Now the boy's thirteen and going on fourteen. The boy doesn't know this other man's face from Adam's, and the war wasn't exactly conducive to frequent exchanges of letters. Sometimes he wonders if it's already too late to try and repair things with his son and then he watches how his uncle acts with the boy, and he's pretty sure that it is too late. But it's not so terrible of a thing after all, because at least the role was filled. Boy had a father figure, that's what counts.

He has to watch the way he talks. She doesn't say it, but he knows that she's a little bit disturbed by his tattoos. Signs and stories all, marked down so that he wouldn't forget the important things. The people he'd killed for, the people he'd failed to save, the Siege of Kochi and the poor girl who got caught by a blast meant for another man, and he never would have sent it if he'd known that she would pop out right then. He didn't even know there were noncombatants right there at the time. They'd said it was all clear, dammit. There's not a single Veteran with more than half of their skin free of ink. But they're important to him, nearly part of his life and being, so he pretends that he doesn't notice the way she sometimes looks at the tattoos.

So he watches the way he talks, at least. Because she don't know the canty, and soi it's fine he talks just a little differently, but he can't expect her to know the other words he picked up in that little tafri he spent eleven years fighting. He shifts down the gull at two in the morning, sleeps in the khota, and if she knew what it meant, she'd think him completely yeda, because he can't leave the tamasha behind some nights, and he calls a person healthy if they're thirty pounds underweight, because that was joke, back in the hell camps, joke was funny because it was true, and it's just a constant reminder that she's randi to a world she'll never be a part of, no matter how hard she tries.

So he watches the way he talks, and he tries so hard not to talk with the words he's spent eleven years using, because he doesn't want her to understand no more than barely half of the words coming out of his mouth. It's not her fault that they had to build a whole new culture out there, out of bits of what they'd brought with them and what they'd found in Dia, just to stay sane, just because they needed something they could call their own.

His hand is always at the ready, just in case there's something wrong and he needs to fire. He doesn't jump at loud noises because jumping gets you killed, but suddenly he's ready to shoot again before everything clears up, and nobody realizes that he'd just fallen back into the war for a brief moment, nobody except the other Veterans, the ones who are dealing with the same exact thing. He's always looking around, trying to hear everything, and half the time it takes the fallen look on his wife's face for him to realize that he's acting like he's still in Dia, where even being asleep in the base wouldn't mean that a fight wouldn't break out in the next instant.

He knows how she feels, even if she doesn't know it. The world has moved on without him, and it was stupid for everyone to think that they could come back and pick up where they'd left off. Eleven years, they'd lost, and now they're set adrift. He's still got a wife. How many of them lost spouses? Sometimes they were thought dead, and lots of times it just turns out that eleven years is too long for some people, and perhaps it makes it feel even worse, that those who went to Dia can't blame those who'd tried to move on, needing someone, and remarried.

Sometimes he wonders if he shouldn't have come back. Maybe he should have let her think him dead a long time ago so that she could pick up and move on. The rest of the world seems to have gone on splendidly without him, and maybe it was a stupid idea, trying to fit back into a spot that didn't need filling.


End file.
